In recent years, electronic trading systems have gained widespread acceptance for trading of a wide variety of items, such as goods, services, financial instruments, and commodities. For example, electronic trading systems have been created which facilitate the trading of financial instruments and commodities such as stocks, fixed income securities including notes and bonds, currencies, futures contracts, oil, and gold.
Many of these electronic trading systems allow traders to submit trading orders for particular trading products to market centers. Using trading orders, traders typically deal in one trading product and in one market center at a time. However, financial markets and trading strategies have evolved so that traders find it more beneficial to trade subject to strategies that may call for trades that deal in more than one trading product and more than one market center. Sometimes, there may be insufficient liquidity in the market centers to fill a particular trading order for a particular trading product or group of trading products, and the information that must be processed to identify optimal trading opportunities may be so extensive as to delay or inhibit the execution of the trading strategy. Such situations may prevent a trader from executing the desired trading order or series of trading orders. In addition, such situations may cause a trader to be left with an unfilled or partially filled trading order. That trader may subsequently attempt to identify alternative trading products and/or market centers where there is sufficient liquidity. To identify alternative trading products and/or market centers, a trader may be required to track multiple different trading products and market centers and the relationships among those trading products and market centers. Such a process may be time consuming and cause a trader to miss opportunities for making beneficial trades.